Undercover Illusions
by Eyl
Summary: One year, six months, five days since Shawn left. Now a serial killer with a desire for revenge is out to get him. Lassiter and Juliet set out to warn Shawn, but will they find him in time? Or... Is he already dead? Possible whumpage later
1. Misperception

**Disclaimer: Anything recognizable from the TV show Psych does not belong to me. I do not earn money off this. It is purely fanmade for recreational purposes, no copyright infringement intended.**

**Rating: No swearing, no slash, no 'mature' romance. May be some gore and/or violence. May include kissing. Also deals with the topic of suicide.**

**A/N: First Fanfiction I've ever posted here! Hope you like it. Reviews are appreciated.**

Juliet followed Lassiter as he strolled swiftly across the mechanic's shop, his stern features already forming a glare. Unluckily for the man they were about to question, Lassiter had not gotten his three-cream four-sugar coffee that morning.

"Head Detective Carlton Lassiter, SBPD. We're looking for a man going by the name of 'Shawn Spencer'. We have reason to believe he stopped by here within the last year, six months and five days. Have you seen him?"

Lassiter showed first his badge, then his warrant to be searching an area out of his jurisdiction, then casually pulled back his suit coat to reveal the gun he was carrying.

The man glanced at the badge, raised an eyebrow at the warrant, and completely failed to notice the gun. Or maybe he was just ignoring it. It was hard to tell.

"No. He important?"

The man's insolent tone was not helping Lassiter's mood.

"Yes he's important, why else do you think we're tracking him you over-sized-"

"Carlton!" Juliet cut off the insult, giving him a fierce warning look. She turned back to to look at the man. She smiled, leaning forward in a fashion designed to be friendly.

"We need to find him for a case we're working on. We think he may have stopped here around a year ago to get motorcycle repairs. Any information you could provide would be much appreciated."

The large man shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth, looking bored. "Can't help ya."

Lassiter glared daggers at him. "I am a detective from the SBPD and if you don't cooperate so help me I will have you in jail for withholding information!" Juliet grabbed his arm to keep him from pulling his gun out.

The man snorted. "Look, _detective_, I'm not a video camera. I don't remember customers from that far back. Go ask someone with photographic memory if you want to know."

_Photographic memory._ Guilt lurked at the back of Juliet's mind. She suppressed it, more out of long habit then conscious effort.

She tightened her grip on Lassiter's arm to keep him from saying anything, and pasted on another fake smile.

"Could you check your customer records, please?"

The man shifted his toothpick again. "Don't have any."

Lassiter stared at him. "What? What do you mean you don't have any? It's illegal not to keep customer records!"

"My customers pay in cash. I have no reason to keep records."

Juliet gave the man a skeptical look. _What sort of mechanics shop only accepts cash?_

"What about cash receipts?" She asked.

"I keep those in a pile of shoeboxes in the back room. There are a few thousand of them and they're not sorted. If you'd like to spend the next several months of your life going through them, be my guest."

Despair began to to break down Juliet's resolve. Another lead lost. At this rate, they'd never find him.

The man must have noticed the despair on Juliet's face, because he seemed to relent slightly.

"Look, I could ask my senior mechanics if they remember anything. They take over the shops for me sometimes when I'm away and one of them could have been on duty when this guy came along. I'll need a little more then a name, though. Think you can provide a description?"

Juliet nodded, a small bit of hope cutting through the despair like a blade of sunlight on a cloudy day. But just like sunlight, it vanished and the clouds closed in again.

It was her fault Shawn had left. Her fault that they didn't know where he was now. She never should have told...

Juliet was drawn out of her thoughts by the sound of Lassiter's voice.

"-going, we don't have all day."

The man gave a short nod. "This way."

He led them towards the back of the shop, past piles of broken-down junk and large containers of tools. They reached the work-area where the cars were, and the man led them over to a red sports car. A loud drilling-sort-of-sound filled the area around it, making it impossible to hear anything. The sports car was propped up, and a woman lay stretched out underneath it with a power tool.

The woman was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt, both of which were covered in oil stains. Her face was a mask of concentration.

The man waved his arms at the woman to get her attention. "Jane!" He called.

The drilling-sound stopped. Jane looked up, an annoyed expression on her face.

"_What?_"Her irritation was clearly expressed in her tone of voice.

"Couple of detectives want to ask you some questions. Something about a customer." The man said gruffly. He turned to look at the detectives. "If you'll excuse me, I have more important work to tend to."

He left.

Jane stood up, wiping her fingers on her jeans and muttering under her breath. She walked over to the detectives and silently raised one eyebrow at them.

Juliet put on another smile and pulled out her badge. "Hi, we're detectives from the SBPD, we're tracking someone and we have reason to believe he may have stopped here. We'd like to ask you a few questions."

Jane crossed her arms and waited.

Lassiter took over the conversation. "We need to know if you've seen anyone by the name of Shawn Spencer. Average height, brown hair, green eyes. Never stops talking."

A wary look came over Jane's face. "Why do you want know?"

"None of your-"

"Carlton!"

Lassiter glared at Juliet, but fell silent. Juliet sighed.

"He's...He used to be a consultant for the police station we work at. And he's in danger. We need to find him immediately. He probably would have stopped by here around a year ago." Juliet gave Jane an imploring look. "Please, if you know anything, tell us."

Jane was silent a moment. "A Shawn Spencer did stop by here while I was on duty once, but it was over one and _a half _years ago."

Juliet's heart jumped. "Yes! It could have been one and a half years ago! Please, do you know where he was headed?"

Jane hesitated, then spoke. "He's dead."

**A/N: How'd you like it? Should I continue it? Please let me know! :D**


	2. Always Raining

**A/N: So, in between each chapter, I'm going to do a sort of oneshot. It's going to be in first person, and present tense. It will always have something to do with the story, but it may seem vague at first and you might not know how it ties in right away. No worries though, I'll explain it all later.**

**Also, in case you haven't noticed, the theme for this fanfiction is illusions (note the title). However, for the oneshots between each chapter, the theme is going to be rain.**

_Rain. It's always raining here. If not outside, then in my heart._

_You never really know what you have until it's gone. Never see what's coming until it's too late._

_I guess someday I'll come to terms with what happened. After all, I can't stay like this forever... Right?_

_Sometimes I can't even make myself think about it, it's so painful. ...Sometimes, I can't stop._

_The gun felt so cold in my hand. You know, I'd never held a gun before then. My father showed me how to use one, a long time ago, but he never actually let me touch it. Just told me to watch what he did, and remember, in case I ever needed it._

_Now I wish he'd never taught me at all._

_The gun only held one bullet. That's all I had put in it. It wasn't like I was planning to use it._

_I'd just been trying to disable him, keep him from following me. I was trying to hit him in the arm, just put him in enough pain that he couldn't run after me._

_I didn't know it was so difficult to aim a gun until then. It looked so easy on TV..._

_I wasn't trying to kill him... _

_Jail is such a lonely place._

_It's always raining here._


	3. Mirage

**A/N: I changed the time that Shawn was gone from two and a half years to one and a half years 'cause it makes more sense. Sorry for the edit!**

Juliet stared numbly at Jane. Disbelief came first, followed by shock. No. No, Shawn couldn't be dead. That just wasn't possible.

"How did he..." Juliet couldn't finish her question.

Jane hesitated again before speaking. Finally, she spoke. "Shawn Spencer came by the mechanics shop while I was on duty about a year and a half ago. He dropped off his motorcycle at the shop, promising to pick it up the next day. He never showed up. The next day there was an article in the newspaper saying he had been found dead on the floor of his motel room that morning. The cause was suicide."

"_Suicide?_" Lassiter's shocked half-shout made Juliet jump. He'd been silent when Jane had said Shawn was dead, and Juliet had almost forgotten he was still standing next to her.

Then it registered. _Suicide._ A hand went up to cover her mouth.

"Oh no..." She whispered. This was all her fault. She'd betrayed him. And now he was dead because of it.

Juliet was drawn out of her thoughts by Lassiter grabbing her arm.

"Come on. We're going down to this town's police station. Assuming it even _has_ a police station."

Juliet resisted him pulling her, confused. "Why?"

"To find out if he's really dead."

**pineapplepineapplepineapple (aka, some time passed)**

Juliet waited as a filing clerk ruffled through the case files, looking for the one they had requested.

They'd only been waiting for a few minutes, but it felt like hours.

Lassiter had driven them from the mechanics shop to the local police station (yes, there was a police station, small town or no) and demanded to see any case files regarding Shawn Spencer. After identifying themselves as detectives from another police station, they were herded into the files archive by one of the clerks.

And now here they were, waiting.

The clerk helping them was a young female, with blond hair and pretty blue eyes. Her facial structure indicated a possibly British background. Around her neck was a gold locket, with two entwined S's engraved on it. The chain was very fine, with two tiny pearls on either side of the locket.

Currently, the clerk was ruffling through some files, searching for the one that documented Shawn's murder.

Juliet felt tense, an ominous feeling of dread tingling down her back. She didn't want to read the case file. What if it had a suicide note in it? She didn't want to read Shawn's reasons for ending his life. She already knew it was her fault. She didn't need a case file to confirm that.

She'd been so angry at Shawn when she found out he'd lied to her... She'd acted rashly, telling Lassiter, telling the chief.

Shawn was good at what he did. He'd solved more cases then anyone. What did it matter if he lied a bit while doing it? It hadn't affected his work.

But she'd felt so betrayed. How could he have kept something so major from her? And for so long...

It was hard to believe he'd kept it up for five whole years.

Tears were starting to form in her eyes. She reached up a hand to wipe them away.

"Here it is!" The clerk exclaimed, startling Juliet out of her thoughts. "Shawn Spencer, right?"

Lassiter answered her question by grabbing the file out of her hands. He opened it and began flipping through it quickly, skipping past most of the paperwork.

He located a photo and pulled it out. He silently handed it to Juliet, an even-more-grim-then-usual look on his face.

Juliet inhaled sharply when she saw the photo. It was of Shawn, laying stretched out on a rug. He was wearing a bright green shirt and jeans, and his hair was immaculate. He looked even handsomer then she remembered.

All but for the blood. A deep stain covered the front of his shirt, and a pathway of red stretched across his face.

He really was dead. A strangled cry somehow made it past the lump in her throat. She dropped the photo, and it fell to the ground.

The clerk gave Juliet a concerned look. "Are you alright?" She asked gently.

Juliet opened her mouth to reply, but Lassiter stopped her.

"She's fine!" Lassiter said sharply. "If you don't mind, we'd like a few minutes to go through the file._ Privately_."

The clerk bit her lip, glancing at Juliet, then nodded. "Alright. If you need me, I'll be just outside."

Lassiter leaned over and picked up the dropped photo, sticking it neatly back into the file.

He was about to close the file, but then stopped suddenly.

"O'Hara. Look at this." He took out a piece of paper and handed it to Juliet.

It was the autopsy. Neatly at the top of the page was listed the cause of death.

Juliet gasped.

Shawn was murdered!

**A/N: First he commits suicide, then he's murdered. Don't worry, it will all be explained soon.**

**Please tell me how you like it! I would also love suggestions on how it could be improved. Oh, and please message me if you see any typos or grammar errors - I tend to make a lot of mistakes. **

**Thanks so much for all the reviews! :D Every one of them totally makes my day**


	4. 80s Pineapple

**A/N: Moved the motel-oneshot here. (Used to be in the middle of Chapter 3, but I decided that was too confusing.) It's also been expanded slightly.**

_I never thought I'd end up living in one of those rural country towns._

_Boy, was I wrong. Oh well. At least it's got pineapples._

_My life will never be completely hopeless so long as there's a pineapple to cheer me up._

_The motel's awful, though. If you can even call it a motel. More like an old worn-down farmhouse that's been around for a couple centuries. And was abandoned for most of that time. ...And lived through several tornadoes, at least three fires, eight floods, five earthquakes, a hurricane, and two volcanic eruptions._

_Okay, I exaggerate. Only one volcanic eruption._

_Gotta find work soon 'cause I'm low on money. Hey, do you think they have any pineapple farms around here? Maybe they'd take on an intern! Dude, that would be awesome._

_Sent postcards to Dad and Gus today. They're probably still mad at me though... Yea, definitely still mad at me. Guess I'd better wait a few months before I try asking for any favors._

_Don't even want to think about Jules._

_It's storming like crazy outside. I can barely hear myself for the rain. Makes it kind of gloomy in here. Sort of fits..._

_Okay, this journaling-thing is getting way too depressing. I mean, come on, isn't writing suppose to cheer you up, not get you depressed?_

_Maybe all those crazy writer people are all liars part of a secret government conspiracy to get people to start journaling so that they can steal everyone's journals and-_

_You know, tangents aren't quite so much fun without Gus to annoy._

_Or Dad. Or Jules. Heck, I'd even settle for Lassie right now._

_DUDE! Did you know this place has got an entire collection of 80s movies and a slightly-smaller-version of a big-screen TV? Pff, who needs pineapple? I'm off to watch some movies!_


End file.
